Speech often includes a number of dominant and secondary pitches that convey the various sounds included in the speech. For example, a particular voiced sound may include a dominant pitch and a number of harmonic components produced by vibration of the vocal cords. Unfortunately, background noise interferes with the ability of many cochlear implant patients to recognize these pitches. Hence, many cochlear implant patients have difficulty understanding speech in noisy environments.
Various cochlear implant systems alleviate this problem to some degree by using noise reduction techniques configured to reduce the amount of noise contained in audio signals presented to cochlear implant patients. Additional improvements in speech perception may be made by enhancing the dominant and secondary pitches included an audio signal presented to a cochlear implant patient. This is typically done by detecting spectral peaks included in a frequency spectrum of the audio signal, identifying each spectral peak that is associated with a dominant or secondary pitch, and then enhancing the identified spectral peaks. Unfortunately, this process can be computationally intensive and error prone.